If you want to combine three themes in one film, make sure to keep track of all three

I managed to catch Zombieland the other day (last week in fact) and, despite the box office receipts and despite my personal reluctance to post yet another pan

1. Zombieland is one of those "seen the trailer, seen it all" flicks. In other words, once you've laughed and enjoyed the mayhem of the trailer and then said "I'd like to see that", don't bother.

2. The promotional campaign for this film is probably mostly at fault. Trailers and ads give you the impression that the film is supposed to be a comedic send up of the genre. Unfortunately, it only tries to be that, but isn't.

Given the name and the focus on the theme park in the trailers, I got the distinct impression that the story was something along the lines of: Zombie Virus causes civilization to fall. Survivors are a bit wacky. One or a group of them open up a theme park where the main attraction is offing zombies in interesting and creative ways and somewhere along the line conflict enters with a quest to name/win the coveted title of Best Zombie Killer of the Year.

Now I understand that this is my personal impression from the trailers (online and in the theater), but I think it is a justified one given the tag lines and cut scenes that were chosen for that trailer.

What we got was a pastiche of what was probably three different original scripts: a pure (comedic) zombie survival flick featuring a nerd who, despite his physical limitations and phobias about everything, has managed to survive and is writing a survival guide; the zombie theme park flick I outlined above and a chase/three way romance/zombie rogues screwing each other over comedy somewhat like Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, but with zombies instead of scams.

Mashed and mixed together, we end up with a film that starts to go in three different directions (promisingly) and then sputters out as it can't seem to find its true focus amongst any of the themes.

I was really looking forward to several silly rounds of one-upsmanship between Harrelson's 'I was born to be a zombie killer' character and the nerd's 'I survive because I'm full of phobias' character, but we got none of that.

The women never developed either and, in a very strange twist, despite the fact that they were always managing to put one over on the boys, they were the ones that had to be rescued in the end.

In summation: nice idea, poorly handled. A lot of creative energy went into different ways to kill zombies that should have gone into writing a tighter script.

I'm still very enamored of my original impression: Zombieland the theme park, with awards to Killer of the Month.